Posted
by
ScuttleMonkey
on Friday April 10, 2009 @04:41PM
from the boom-headshot dept.

mb writes to mention that Germany has gone one step further in impeding access to Wikileaks. Germany's registration authority, DENIC, recently suspended Wikileaks.de without notice. "The action comes two weeks after the house of the German WikiLeaks domain sponsor, Theodor Reppe, was searched by German authorities. Police documentation shows that the March 24, 2009 raid was triggered by WikiLeaks' publication of Australia's proposed secret internet censorship list. The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) told Australian journalists that they did not request the intervention of the German government."

This is why I think we have to wait before we let Turkey join the EU. We've got to clean up our own house first, and the more nations are added that exhibit such behaviour (Turkey for example was somewhat recently in the news for banning richarddawkins.net) the harder the cleansing is going to be.

If you have some stuff on your site, that I don't want people to see, or I plan to do something, that you will somehow find out and post it on your site, and then I shut your domain name down - Censorship.At least a form of it.

Wikileaks.org is the main domain name and has not been shut down. No access to information has been lost, except to the tiny minority of people who were only using wikileaks.de and don't know how to use a search engine.

I don't think so. Germany is a neighboring country to mine and one of the biggest in the EU. I find this trend in a country that should know better for historical reasons quite disturbing. The fact remains that this stuff starts small and then grows. How long before Germany suggests a web filter so that these kind of tactics are effective?

Then German law is improper. To say that it is illegal to tell the public what sites have been blocked, indeed, disappeared by another government is beyond fascist. The child pornography gambit has always been a ruse to allow censoring whatever the tyrants don't want us to see.

And if a policeman or prosecutor claims that you have gotten too close to doing any of the above, she can take down your whole site, especially the bits that are exposing government criminality, seize the domain name, take all your stuff and lock you up. Now there is no way of knowing what they have censored or redressing the intentional or sloppy misuse of the thoughtcrime statutes by the private companies that implement the secret laws. But - think of the children! It's for the children! Anyone who claims otherwise must be a anarchist-communist-terrorist-liberal-necro-copro-sado-pedophile-boogyman!

take down your site -> seize your domain name -> lock you up -> take all your stuff -> take the stuff from all the people in the general vicinity [slashdot.org] of yours -> lock up everyone you discussed the site with -> lock up all people who associated with you in any way

How are we supposed to deal with the child-porn problem if we're not allowed to discuss it ? People revert to an apelike mental state the moment you mention pedophilia.

Want to mess with that prick who cut you off on the highway ? Call 911 and tell them you saw him rape a 6 year old, he will be arrested and detained within the hour, and those lovely cops will make sure to tell everyone he's a pedophile before the day is done. Not a single neuron will fire, nobody will dare think about evidence or motive. It's like the term "kiddie porn" is the root password to society, with it you can get anything done to anyone.

If they really want to combat child pornography, they need to attack the source: producers. Hiding links will not make it go away. Revoking domains will not make it go away. Shutting down servers wont' even make it go away. Our beloved Streisand effect ensures that any and all censorship is met with an even greater riposte.

How is just having a website address to a child porn site illegal, if you didn't even visit the link? I wonder how any blacklisting filtering software would be legal in Germany if it filters out illegal content sites.

The list does not appear to be a child porn list. There are a few things which might be child porn, or might be barely legal style sites (I'm not willing to load them and find out). Some others appear, from the URL, to have animated porn involving drawings of youngsters, I can't say if thats legal in Australia or Germany, but I would guess not.

The majority of the sites appear to be either adult porn sites, individual files from user upload sites, or troll sites (2girls1cup, meatspin) two of the blocked si

.... this is why a decentralized Internet with no intelligence on the switches is important. Because of that, Wikileaks was able to have multiple hosts in multiple countries that are affected by very different sets of laws and busybodies. Even though two major players got together to knock Wikileaks off the Internet, it still is humming along quite nicely.

Folks, fear the day that somebody requests control over who gets to have access to the Internet (Obama, I'm looking at you) and who gets routed where. Yes, QoS is technically going in that direction, but it is still difficult to abuse that for the purpose of knocking random offenders of the Internet. If that somebody happens to be The Government, you can be sure that a) all other governments will want the same control, and b) diplomacy and general government douchbaggery will only leave the blandest, least offensive and best lobbied/bribed sites up and running. Everything else will have moved underground, where again, you'll have to know the right people to get access to the good stuff.

This isn't about wikileaks. Your internet routing is not as robust as you think it is. If you only have one ISP, they control every chunk of unencrypted information that passes between you and the outside world. You need to have a couple of friends in topographically dispersed locations. For those of us who have no friends, the Tor [torproject.org] folks are more than happy to help out.

The situation in Germany is insane.Being from Sweden, I've gone on several booze runs to Germany.I speak a very neutral English (along with four other languages), and can easily pull off various accents to the point where I've had people:*) Ask iIf I'm from Edinburgh*) Ask if I'm from England*) Ask if I'm polish*) Ask if I'm australian*) Called me "a fucking New York dick"*) Ask me if I'm Canadian

I know quite a few Germans who speak better English than I speak German, but when I went over on an exchange languages were very badly taught. We went to some of their lessons, and discovered that we were better at going between French and German (our second and third language) than they were (their second and first language). Personally, I blame the fact that they start school several hours before civilised people have woken up...

The law which would allow them to suspend a domain for anything is not yet through our assembly - IF they did this, it's illegal - also the message from the Domain name registrar (DENIC) translates out to

The requested domain is currently not reachable

The domain-owner or the administrative contact should be informed about these problems by now. We expect them to be solved soon.

If you as domain-owner or administrative contact are not yet informed about the hassle, we might not have reached you. In this case, please contact:...

so this MIGHT be a technical problem, though this still highly alarms me, since I am a political activist in germany, myself...

On international sites,.de domains function primarily as a tangible target for the censors we have here. The wikipedia.de domain has been forced on several occasions to remove its link to de.wikipedia.org. Keeps them busy, I guess.

I'd be more worried if they started raiding the homes of the domain owners--- oh, wait.:P

While there is no real loss of access to the information or loss of information itself, the loss of the wikileak.de domain is bad for those who prefer to use it. As has been argued elsewhere in these comments, this is censorship and it is wrong (even if it was accidental or some misunderstanding).

How do we prevent this or restore this? The wikileak system should be more distrubuted. OK, it probably already is pretty distributed, especially when you account for the language- or country-specific domains. However, maybe we can do more? WikiTaxi (http://www.wikitaxi.org/delphi/doku.php/products/wikitaxi/index) is something I just learned about today and it looks quite interesting. Can you imagine how difficult it would be to bring down a P2P version of a wikileak website? I don't know the technical details of how to set it up, but there are a lot of incredibly smart programmers out there who can make it happen.

It's scary how many posters here apparently can't tell the difference between (a) censoring a list of links, mainly to child porn, that is, rightly or wrongly, illegal to redistribute in the country concerned; and (b) killing or incarcerating millions based only on racial/religious prejudice. I guess making comparisons with the Nazis because this particular unpopular decision was made in Germany makes a certain type of person feel good. Irony, thy name is Slashdot.

It's scary how many posters here apparently can't tell the difference between (a) censoring a list of links, mainly to child porn, that is, rightly or wrongly, illegal to redistribute in the country concerned; and (b) killing or incarcerating millions based only on racial/religious prejudice.

The Nazis were putting people in prison for political reasons long before they created death camps. There is some historical relevance here, but unfortunately it has grown into a cliche and thus become mundane. In the 1930s people didn't care that it was Jews and homosexuals, and today people don't care that it is pedophiles. We all need something to hate.

And really, it's all bullshit, FUD, lies and propaganda. The "child porn" on these lists isn't that of children being kidnapped and forced to be sex slaves, it is modeling sites and political sites like Wikileaks. The truth shall set you free. Censorship will always subvert the truth.

Mod parent up. It's both sad and dangerous that people have already become so ignorant of history that some think the holocaust was 'based only on racial/religious prejudice'. Like the burning of the Reichstag never happened.

Blocking internet links is not going to solve the child pornography problem. Hunting down and imprisoning the people who make child porn, while a lot more difficult thing to do, and certainly a lot more expensive, is by far the better way to go about it and might actually produce real results.

But this isn't about child pornography. It's about censoring a website which is dedicated to ensuring transparency in government - and yes, that is exactly the sort of thing that leads to the sort of atrocities that you mention. If you had been paying attention to the controversy over the Australian censorship list, you might have understood that and not posted something as ignorant as what you did.

It amazes me that we're only a couple generations removed from WWII, and still have fascist and dictatorship governments all over the world, yet the very things that those governments are condemned for doing are permissible if it's western democracies doing them.

The whole "godwin" thing irritates the hell out of me. Why shouldn't we make comparisons to the nazis (or Stalin or any of the other destructive dictatorships out there, recent or not?) How exactly is it bad to make comparisons to the worst of humanity's behavior over the last century? Is that not how we determine just how to recognize and stop such behavior before it gets a foothold?

It's like another saying that still irritates me (and I'm not hardly young anymore) - "Judge ye not, lest ye be judged." - if we can't exercise judgement of others, then just how the hell are we supposed to solve the problems that evil sonsabitches bring to this world? Random guessing? (Wait, that'd be the US justice system, sorry)... the whole FUCKING CONCEPT OF HUMAN SENTIENCE demands that we judge the environment we live in at all times, including our fellow sentients, in order to survive...

I suspect that particular saying was introduced to human culture by people who *didn't* want the average joe judging their actions, because of what they were doing...

The problem with those Nazi comparisons is, that they can be used to justify everything, because Nazi is equal to evil. And evil must be opposed. You can wage war on this, or plan your own mass killing, because the oponent is no longer a human, he became a devil.

While that is true, how does one define evil without human example? And perhaps recent human example?

I'd have a lot more sympathy for Wikileaks if they hadn't hosted a whole load of stuff that really should have remained secret and for good reason.

If what they posted was embarrassing, censoring it would be one thing.

When what they post undermines national security or criminal investigations or is otherwise normally considered privileged information for good reasons, and furthermore they go out of their way to keep contributors (who may well have obtained the information illegally) anonymous, and on top of

OK, here's an ironic one: they posted a list of members of the British National Party.

Now, I don't agree with the BNP's politics, and therefore I don't vote for them, but I also don't support rules that are prejudiced against people purely on account of their membership of a certain political party. Such rules are, IMHO, far more dangerous to the democratic process than anything they are likely to prevent.

Wikileaks, supposedly proud of the way it helps the underdog to fight oppressive governments and the laws they use to silence dissent, outed an entire group of people, and cost several of them their jobs as a result.

If that's not a clear enough case, then let me provide a hypothetical example to go with it. Let's suppose that you, personally, have been wrongfully accused of committing a heinous crime. Your country, having regard for due process, requires you to attend a court case to determine your innocence or guilt.

Let us suppose that, mindful of the rule that one is innocent until proven guilty, the judge orders that your identity not be disclosed by the media until the case has concluded. However, anyone in open court can clearly see that you are there, and perhaps one of those people, knowing how heinous the crime you (might have) committed is, decides to post the case details, including your identity, on Wikileaks.

The following day, you get home from court to find an angry mob waiting outside your home, which has been extensively vandalised because obviously if you're in court then you did something wrong and you deserved it. Think this couldn't happen to you? Try looking up what happened to the paediatrician who looked a bit like a low-res photo of a suspected paedophile that was published in a British newspaper.

Sometimes, there are good reasons to keep things secret, and revealing those things publicly does real damage and has no redeeming value whatsoever. Were this not the case, there would be no need for classifications for official secrets, the law wouldn't allow confidentiality clauses in commercial agreements, people wouldn't care about privacy, no-one would have invented data protection laws... Any organisation that makes no attempt to distinguish legitimate cases where secrecy should be respected and repeats any information given to it no matter the implications is a danger to society, and I have no qualms whatsoever about squishing them with any laws and/or firearms that come to hand. That is, after all, no worse than the fate that such an organisation will inevitably inflict on someone innocent, sooner or later.

Everyone knows that if you get arrested then you must have done something wrong. Well, maybe not everyone, but everyone that watches American Idol. Or maybe Survivor. And certainly Survivor-watchers want to see the perp-walk so they know if they ever see someone that looks like that in the grocery store they can avoid them. And keep their kids away.

Come on, it is just like reviewing the sex offender registry and making sure that people that looks like sex offenders are treated like criminals. Or lepers

Arguing the 'essential' nature of secrets with me is not likely a productive experience, which if you peruse my comment history concerning that, would be clear. I'm of the "secrets are a bad thing" camp. The only reason to keep secrets currently is the imbalance of power between those who have the most to hide and those who just think they do. And the only way to overcome that imbalance is to start exposing those at the top and working your way down to the bottom.

Which is why I stated my request as "list the things that you don't think should be up there" rather than "explain to me why secrets should kept"

In regards to your actual example, you will also remember I stated that for any item you listed, someone should be able to come up with a reason for it.

Here is my world view. There may be secrets you'd like to keep about yourself. There may be ideas, fantasies, even events in your life that you don't want shared with the world.

But a political party is by definition a public entity. You are attempting, by your membership, to guide public and government opinion. Your membership to a party should not be a secret. Not in Britain. There are countries in this world where that would be different. But Britain is not one of them. It is not a tyranny. It is not run by a government that is going to go and shove these people into internment camps. The BNP has a history of attempting to play the 'man in the shadows' of attempting to get people into position of authority while hiding their affiliation. This, IMO, is wrong. Even if they weren't the more legitimate sibling of the Nazi's and KKK.

The McCarthy Era of America was a shame specifically because what happened after people were fingered as Communists then was wrong, not because people were outed in the first place.

Anonymity to preserve the unjustly accused or leaks to out those who are guilty but have escaped justice?

Tough choice. And I mean that honestly. Both extremes have their drawbacks. I hope that wikileaks uses their power responsibly.

As for the BNP example, I don't see how that fits into your hypothetical scenario. How is outing someone's political affiliation death to the democratic process? If anything, it is required so as to preserve transparency - which is one of the fundamental requirements for democrac

Most countries don't restrict news about ongoing criminal trials. England and a handful of other countries do declare some cases to be sub judice http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sub_judice [wikipedia.org] but most don't and get along fine. Indeed, if I were being tried for a crime I'd rather it be made public. More eyes make it less likely that the government can get away with crap. The problem in these cases is that the British have a ridiculous attitude about child porn where once someone is even remotely accused of having

European Human Rights law has the concept of a Right to a Private Life, which often works to protect the individual from the state. In this particular case the privacy of the individuals concerned were breached.....BUT.....the right to a Private Life has limits, including health, safety or moral reasons. One could stretch publishing membership of an organisation which is often linked to racist violence was necessary in a democratic society, especially as some of the members appear to have been in jobs tha

If wikileaks is such a fan of transparency, I urge them to post their own contributors IP addresses, full names, and addresses; as well as everyone who provides them with any services or money or other support.

By being transparent about whistleblowers you decrease the transparency by eliminating the whistleblowers. It is the same reason why being tolerant toward intolerant people isn't really a good idea. Or why you shouldn't really feel a need to respect people that doesn't respect others.

I do agree with your last sentence is good though. There is no reason for wikileaks to hide those providing them with services and other support. That is just the same lack of

The Wikinews article, originally published on April 19, described material in the Church Handbook of Instructions. The work is a two-volume book of policies and is a guide for leaders of the Mormon Church. Wikinews obtained the Church Handbook of Instructions from Wikileaks, a whistleblower website which publishes anonymous submissions of sensitive documents while preserving the anonymity of its contributors. Wikileaks describes the material as significant because "...the book is strictly confidential among

Name _one_ Wikileaks post that should have been kept secret. Seriously, almost of the material is kept secret for embarassing political reasons, information that "special" bureaucrats and government officials had but which they wished to keep secret to avoid prosecution. Even Sarah Palin's email showed how she was doing government business on her personal account that she should have turned over to previous subpoenas she'd received.

Even Sarah Palin's email showed how she was doing government business on her personal account that she should have turned over to previous subpoenas she'd received.

Oh geez, lay off the partisan kool-aid already, would ya? The election is over, your guy won. The Palin emails showed nothing of the sort. If anything, they showed that she was careful to not use government email services paid for by the taxpayers for personal and/or political purposes. This has already been beat to death. If there had been anyth

Oh, I wasn't trying to further discredit Palin. I simply point out that even _that_ one, which was relatively innocuous, had political content worth leaking, even though you somehow seem to have missed the parts in her email about state appointments and the Department of Public Safety. If you can bear to read it, it's interesting to see what she writes without campaign handlers writing every word for her.

But with that in mind, I'm contradicting the person who just claimed that most of what's on Wikileaks "s

Oh, I wasn't trying to further discredit Palin. I simply point out that even _that_ one, which was relatively innocuous, had political content worth leaking, even though you somehow seem to have missed the parts in her email about state appointments and the Department of Public Safety.

The appointments are a political matter, as she can appoint who she wants. Governors' and presidents' appointments have always been a political matter and the selection & decision process has not been considered traditiona

In your haste to attack what you would have liked me to write, you have completely missed the point. I am not against exposing government deceit and corruption. Nor, for that matter, is a responsible free press.

But not everything posted on Wikileaks is for that purpose. Some things are legitimately kept secret. If you disagree, please indicate what overriding public benefit justifies advertising normally private but factually accurate information in the following cases:

In order for anything to appear on Wikileaks its secrecy must already have been compromised. Wikileaks merely makes this fact public. Thus when one of the very few things that should legitimately be kept secret appears there it is evidence that someone is incompetent; not that Wikileaks is irresponsible.

In order for anything to appear on Wikileaks its secrecy must already have been compromised.

The moment you share a fact with anyone, its secrecy is potentially compromised. But for society to function, we must have a certain level of trust, and it does no-one any favours to reward arbitrarily betraying such trust.

A lot of what he said is illogical and untrue. Wikileaks does fact check, and in fact if what they posted wasn't true then it wouldn't be so controversial, and governments around the world wouldn't be attempting to shut them down. And no they don't post juvenile and second rate stories; a lot of what they publish is of important political and human interest.

Well it seems I've unintentionally replied to the GP in a round-about way.

Compare them to a respectable site like the smoking gun which actually fact checks their material - and as a result has never been successfully sued.

Wikileaks does not get in trouble for things which aren't true (or not solely due to untruths). It's the true things that people make the most fuss about. For example, the leaked Scientology OT documents were verified as genuine by the legal threats made by the COS, which were based on IP law, not defamation.

Are you sure you understand what Wikileaks is all about? It is precisely about getting information that has been concealed from the public out so that knowledge of the truth of the world can be available. Most people live in a pretty strange dream world where there are "good guys" and "bad guys" and some really strange notions that are used to divide the world into factions that intend to kill one another.

As to your allegations of making information available for "identity theft" you are out of your head. There is a bigger problem. No one can steal an identity. What people can do is make others think that they are someone else. That is not "theft." That is fraud. The people being stolen from through the use of fraudulent means are the people who most depend on a system of identification that puts numeric tags on everyone for the purposes of tracking and controlling them. And when someone pretends to be someone else in order to fool someone else into giving them money, goods or services, in what bizarro world is it the "fault" of the person whose identity was forged or mimicked? "Identity theft" is the name given to fraudulent activity to make it seem as though the "victim" is the person whose identity was copied when the actual victims are those who were fooled by the fraudster. All of this is facilitated by these numeric tags and data records that are assigned to people. This system was created to make it easier to track and trust individuals for business purposes and somehow, the burden and the risk of managing such a system whose primary designers and beneficiaries are government and big money institutions has been placed on the shoulders of the individuals.

You might think your identity lies in the numbers and data records assigned to you. If you do, then you have bought into their game hook line and sinker. I don't. Stay out of debt and you will stay off of their system. People can attempt to "steal my identity" all they want, but since I stay out of debt, there is no way I can be harmed. (Yes, I know that increasingly employers and governments are using credit scores to determine if someone can be trusted... what a big dumb idea that is!)

Employers also prefer to hire those with no family who can pledge their soul to the company and nothing else.

It's like they think they buy you when you sign the dotted line for IT jobs these days including scrutinizing many aspects of your personal life that are frankly none of their f**king business. I'm to the point now that I've declined to take urinalysis tests a few times because I'm tired of being treated like a criminal. And yes, I have clean urine.

So a site dedicated to flagrantly breaking the law, peoples trust, peoples privacy and holding itself above any law or moral standard on the planet gets taken down. Why should anybody be sympathetic?... [Wikileaks doesn't] provide services like the Pirate Bay, all they do is play tattle tale to the world.

Transparency and whistle-blowing sound like pretty good services to me. Do they have best the editorial policies? Are they a good substitute for this thing we used to have called "investigative journalism

That a site uses MediaWiki, and includes Wiki in its name, does not make it a Wikipedia spinoff. MediaWiki is free software, and can be used by anyone, for any purpose, and the word Wiki is not trademarked by the WikiMedia Foundation, and thus, anyone can use that too.

Think about it, this is a site based on breaking trust and that knows no moral grounds. Would they post detailed documents from Iran's nuclear weapons program if leaked, how about biological weapons, how a government database full of citizens information that would be perfect for identity theft?

Thank you for creating a list of things that Wikileaks has never done, and then criticizing them for it.

The notion that there is special information that governments may have but citizens must not under any circumsta

Given there are more than a couple of posts just above you doing some german bashing, might I suggest that posting almost immediately after the article goes up to complain about how there aren't more german bashing comments might seem a bit... hypercritical (and yes, that's the word I meant)?

I'll write quickly, since you seem to have a hair trigger, ADD, and the manners of the southern portion of a north bound ass. At a grand total of 30 posts AFTER mine, you were jumping gun regardless of why you were bitching.